Here, from the award-winning writer and historian Alexander Eliot, is the dramatic story of the rise of ancient Greece to the fall of the Greek Empire - from the city-states of Athens and Sparta to the empire of Alexander the Great and the power of Constantine, from myths of gods and goddesses to the foundations of Orthodox Christianity and from Herodotus and Homer to Aristotle and Euclid. The history of Greece - the birthplace of Western civilization, democracy, mathematics, philosophy, and theater - unfolds in vivid detail in these pages.